Now, when I go home, everything in the fridge is labeled “organic.” The eggs are free-range, hormone-free, cage-free—free of everything, we’re led to think, but their essential, elemental eggness. Ecstatic mission statements and smiley cartoon animals assail the beleaguered opener of the fridge door. Mom’s amped about the Whole Foods opening up at the nearest mini-mall. I’m amped about it too, given that she’s currently buying from a lame southern “organic” supermarket chain that superficially looks the part (abundant displays, neo-Muzak) but overcharges her for bruised produce that isn’t even in season on the faraway continent it comes from.

My mother feels, as she always has, that by buying organic now she’s making the best nutritional choices for our family. If she knows her choices have been schizophrenic in the past, she defends herself by saying that she did her best with the information available at the time.  That’s the best any of us can do, right?

I wonder, though, about the amount of stock she’s putting into “organic.” The word means so many things, covers so much territory, gets spun so many ways. How can the same term apply to both a carrot grown on a small family plot AND to what Michael Pollan refers as the “industrially lathed little bullets” for sale in little plastic packets? More importantly, how are consumers to tell the difference?  

Marketers are hyper-savvy at convincing consumers that what they’re buying “truly” comes from a “small farm,” whether it does (which it sometimes does), or doesn’t (it often doesn’t). What’s a small farm, anyway? What’s organic? Consumers like my mom, who are willing to spend money on “the right stuff” but aren’t motivated enough to do extensive research into what that is, represent a gargantuan market of good-hearted, if blasé, people that Big Organic, for the most part, currently controls. How are the government’s efforts to institute a program that codifies different organic gradations coming along?

More on this in the next column….

Nathalie Jordi's appetites keep her bouncing between between County Cork, New York, London and the French Alps.  When not slinging curd or interviewing farmers, she writes for Travel&Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Gastronomica, and her blog at www.autobiogeography.com.  Her dreams of a life spent baking, drinking margaritas, and sitting in the sun are gathering steam during her current stint as a waitress in New York City.